Bending to Give Way
by Nekokoban
Summary: Maybe he's not her enemy, but he will never be her friend. Katara tends to an injured Zuko.


The thing Katara remembers the most are her mother's hands.

She remembers the careful strength of them, callused and rough from cold and work, but always gentle: in doctoring scrapes or cuts, in braiding rough hair, in stroking away fever-dreams. She remembers the sound of her mother's voice, singing lullabies and the working songs of women long into the night -- her greatest talent, she'd once laughingly said, even as she tended to dinner and finished the mending and caught Sokka before he could trip himself into the fire -- and her laughter, unashamed and loud and unapologetic.

She remembers her mother's face, sweat-damp and pale except for two high spots of color in her cheeks, and the coughing, the wet bloody coughing and the hard unexpected strength of Sokka's arm around her waist as he pulled her back and she found she couldn't make a sound, not even _No Mama no no please Mama no_--

Katara remembers her mother in fragments and pieces and stitched-together memories, and hates that the memory fades a little more each day. She hates the Fire Nation with an old tired bitterness that tastes like smoke in the back of her throat. As a whole its people are dangerous and unpredictable, difficult to manage as their birthright element, and she has learned firsthand to not extend even the briefest trust -- not if she didn't want it sharpened and refined and stabbed in her back.

So now she looks down at the unconscious Fire Prince, limp in his uncle's arms. He looks small and weak, like she could break him with just the half-full waterskin she carries. Not all of his injuries are new: some have already begun to scar, livid pink and weathered brown against his white skin. He breathes slow and ragged, like each one comes as a struggle. From the angle of his arm, it's most certainly broken.

Quiet and still as ice, Katara catalogues what injuries she can see, then looks up. The prince's uncle meets her gaze, unblinking. This isn't a fiercesome general or a brutal dragon -- this is a tired old man, stretched too long and thin and hurt himself, asking for something he knows is unforgivable.

In his arms, the Fire Prince coughs. It sounds rough and tearing and too familiar. Katara puts her hand on her waterskin and breathes slowly: in, out, reaching for that placid liquid calm she uses for 'bending.

"... follow me," she says at last. "One word, and I'll leave you behind."

There is no surprise in the old man's eyes, and she thinks maybe she should be angry about that -- it's pathetically weak to give the bastard prince _another chance_ to trample on her good intentions -- but there is also relief there, so bone-deep and genuine that she turns away. Katara touches the polished-smooth stone at her throat and thinks of her mother's pale face and fading eyes. She thinks about the long thick scar that takes up half of Aang's back and how it still pains him on damp days.

She thinks of her father's face when he found her and Sokka alive but their mother dead, and she thinks of the old man's face when he looked at his nephew.

Without a word she leads the old man and his burden down to the riverside camp. Appa lies on his side with his back to them, snoring loud and deep; Momo dozes curled atop his head. A handful of river pebbles lie scattered near their campfire -- Sokka's gone hunting, Aang got restless, and Toph bored enough to follow one of them. It leaves her an unexpected gift of time, and she turns to the old man and points to the river. "Lay him down there," she said. "Not in the water, but close enough he could reach it."

The old man does as he's told. Katara toes off her shoes, then hesitates at removing her outer robe. The prince is unconscious and his uncle distracted by that, and there's an entire fast-moving river right there, but ...

But. She grits her teeth and shrugs out of the outer layers of cloth, so she can wade into the river without getting her clothes wet. The river rises halfway to her knees, fast and icy-cold even in the heat of summer. She bends and presses her palms to the water, taking a deep breath and reaching for the power inherent in the swift unending current. It gathers to her will, starting as a gentle glow in her palms that spreads down to her fingertips and up to her wrists, gloving her hands entirely in captured water. The old man watches her gravely, and for a moment she's acutely humiliated at knowing that she's standing half-naked before him -- but he says nothing, and there is no calculation or hunger in his look -- just that same tired old hope she's seen in a thousand different variations.

She reaches out and lays her hands upon the Fire Prince, one where a diagonal slash down his chest has laid his chest bare, and the other on his broken arm. Under her touch he makes a kitten-weak noise, but doesn't even have the strength to stir. Many of his injuries are less serious than she'd first

(hoped)

thought -- exhaustion is really the worst of it, though she can tell that if the bone is not set properly and immediately, it'll never heal right. There's internal bruising but no bleeding, and the smoke inhalation is relatively minor. Katara hovers, acutely aware of the old man's eyes on her. She thinks of her mother, bloody lips and wet eyes, and the prince makes another weak noise as the blood within him stirs.

A human body is mostly water, after all; that's how the healing aspect of waterbending works. One nudge here and a clumsy pass here, and there'd be a blood clot which could stop the prince's heart like _that_; a little pressure and there'd be a bruise in his brain, and he'd never wake up. It wouldn't do much in the end: the rumors are fat and plentiful in the Fire Nation when food is not, and the only thing that's certain from all of them is that there is no love between the Fire Lord and his firstborn.

If he died here, on this muddy riverbank, the only one to mourn him would be an old man, and perhaps the memory of his mother's ghost.

She closes her eyes.

At its very core, using waterbending to heal isn't all that different from using it to fight; it's just a matter of how the energies are directed, and how delicately they're controlled. One still encourages the movement of the water, coaxing it from its normal path and using its power as your catspaw.

The arm goes first: she's not skilled enough to heal it completely, but she can straighten the bone and encourage it to heal properly, as long as it's kept straight; she clears the smoke from his lungs and turns his head away from her when he begins to cough it up, phlegm studded black and gray. She leeches excess blood away from the softest bruises, washing it away and mending what she can of his external cuts as she can. At some point color begins to leech back into the prince's face, and his breathing grows louder, steadier.

While she works, the old man says nothing. He sits a careful distance away, his hands fisted on his knees. They might shake a little; out of deference for his grief, if nothing else, she doesn't look to make sure.

I want to kill him, Katara wants to say; it's there on the tip of her tongue and burning in her throat, and it makes her hands shake as she makes a last check of the prince's injuries. It won't change anything. It won't bring anyone back. It's not even all his fault, but _I want to kill him anyway._

Instead, she looks up. "I did what I could," she says. "He'll need to rest. That's the best thing for him."

The old man looks at her. Despite his age, his eyes are bright and clear and hard; she knows he can see everything she's wanted to do -- and how she's taking the higher road, by not acting on that; this makes her _better_, it makes _Aang_ better, because they're not killers, they're not--

"You have our thanks," the old man says gravely. "But you should know that this resentment you carry will poison you eventually. The Avatar will need you to be stronger than that."

She clenches her hands. "That's funny," she growls. "The Dragon of the West trying to tell me not to be angry--"

"I did not say that," the old man says. "Only that your anger is not clean. It will only weaken you in the end."

Around her, the water begins to swirl and boil. "I am not the little girl who ran and hid when the Fire Nation destroyed her tribe," she snarls. "_I will not let it happen again._ I--"

Below her, the Fire Prince groans. Her eyes snap down, and the waters around her surges up, the waves hardening into ice spears, all aimed at the boy's throat. She can sense the old man tensing, ready to act against her, but he'd have to take his nephew out as well, and he wouldn't--

The prince opens his eyes. He looks straight up at her, dazed and shivering.

And he smiles.

Surprised, Katara pauses; the ice around her fades back to water, slowly sinking back down to the river. The prince's eyes aren't focused at all; she's not even sure if he's really seeing her, but that smile is open and honest and ... _sweet_. It reminds her of Aang at his best. It changes his face entirely.

His lips move. Most of what he says fades in and out, and most of _that_ is drowned under the river's rushing voice, but what she hears is: _you're beautiful._

She thinks she might have heard _mother_ as well.

The old man comes forward as the prince's eyes close again, and gathers the boy up. His expression is regretful, but not angry -- in her moment of cold shock, she sees that he's not angry at her for threatening his nephew; he doesn't resent her for all the things she'd wanted to do, but there's a sadness in him that's for _her_, now. It's not pity, but it stings just as bitterly.

"You'd better leave," she says finally. "Before Aang and the others come back."

He looks at her, then nods. "I think it would be best," he agrees. He bows low, his form perfect even with his burden, then turns (deliberately, she realizes, in how he waits five full seconds with his back to her and her in the river) and walks away.

Katara waits until he's gone, and looks down at her hands. They're nothing like her mother's, though they're work-roughened and hard: she's not meant for gentle work. It dissatisfies her.

And yet still she can feel the prince's heartbeat under her fingertips, stuttering and settling, and the peculiar intimacy of healing. She couldn't look into his mind, she doesn't know what he's thinking, but that guileless smile stays with her, and it ...

She closes her hands into fists so hard that they shake, and closes her eyes. 


End file.
